Shown herein is a young John Hintlian, circa 1940.
Where’s Hintlian?
By John Ogle, Ocean Springs MS
Arms Chronicle Archivist’s Note: This article was published, in a much shorter form, in the Spring 2002 edition of the Rampant Colt. That version amounted to roughly 1/3 or half of this edition. This edition as not been published to the editor/archivist’s knowledge. John Ogle is author of such books as Colt Memorabilia Price Guide and The Book of Colt Paper. His personal association and friendship with John Hintlian is one of the few remaining windows into the world of a man who saved countless pieces of Colt related historical paper.
Where’s Hintlian? He had that packet of Colt TM-2 papers for me. Where’s Hintlian? He was holding that .45 rimfire Peabody cartridge for me.
John Hintlian died over a year ago, November 27, 2000 at the age of 89. His absence is quietly becoming apparent to collectors at many of the shows as they as, “where’s Hintlian?”
We have lost yet another grand gentleman and a great resource. As collectors, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to John Hintlian. In my opinion, the persistence of John Hintlian in pursuing and collecting Colt memorabilia is responsible for a large percentage of the Colt ephemera available today. If in doubt, we need only look through our collection to find that John has left his mark, a neatly penciled price in the upper right hand corner, on every Colt collector.
John Hovaness Hintlian was born 28 April, 1911 in Brooklyn, New York, to Setrack and Sarah Hintlian. He was the second oldest of five boys and one girl. His parents immigrated from Armenia in 1905 just prior to the Turkish genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Armenians from Turkey. The family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1922 where they operated a baker and a grocery store on Broad Street.
John graduated from New Britain High School in the Spring of 1929, just before the stock market crash in the fall. John had joined an uncle working at the Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company. He considered himself fortunate to be employed during the Great Depression. His younger brother Albert also worked for Colt, but for a short period only. While employed at Colt, John continued his education at night classes. From 1930 to 1932, he studied engineering , and from 1933 to 1934, he studied engineering. He continued his studies in 1945 at Hillyer Junior College in management and followed in 1947 by metallurgy at Connecticut State.
John worked in the engineering department at Colt, designing jigs, fixtures, and gauges for use in the manufacture of small arms and machine guns. He served as special engineer for work in conjunction with subcontracts, and he was involved in research and development of small arms. Today it is hard to imagine life without computers and calculators, but during John’s career, he had calculated all the trigonometric values by long hand and carried the divisions out to four decimals. Slide rules were not even readily available. John also produced blue prints by hand. The original drawings were produced with pencil on heavy cardboard. The drawings were then traced onto draftsman’s linen with India ink to make a file copy. When a print was needed on the manufacturing floor, a working copy had to be made. The linen copy would be placed over a sheet of specially treated paper, carried outside, exposed to sunlight, and then hand developed, fixed, and dried in a darkroom. Areas of the paper covered by ink would be white, while the rest of the paper would turn blue, hence the name “blueprint.”
In 1933, John was assigned the task of producing the Blue Eagle posters for the Colt factory. John admitted to have no artistic ability and had to rely on straight edge and compass to draw the poster, an eagle clutching a cog wheel and lightning bolts. The blue eagle was the symbol of the National Recovery Act initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring the U.S. out of the Great Depression. It provided benefits and incentives to the major industries that agreed to abide by Federal Codes. Member industries were allowed to display the NRA symbol the “Blue Eagle.”
John started collecting guns while working for Colt. He managed to save money out of his weekly $17.00 pay check and bought a “woodsman” pistol for $22.88. His collection grew to admirable proportions, including over 40 different machine guns, even including a Gatling gun that guarded his back porch. Unfortunately, the Gatling gun proved futile because vandals broke in and stole his entire collection. Disheartened from collecting guns, John turned to gun cartridges and paper. He amassed material from all the different gun companies and even non-gun manufacturing companies. However, his interest in guns remained strong.
In the early 1930s, Charles Morse was transferred to the engineering department. John learned that Morse and several other employees were target shooting at the state National Guard Armory during lunch so he joined them. When the Armory needed it’s range, the Colt shooters relocated to the range of the Capital City Rifle and Revolver Club. John Hintlian’s task was keeping the records of the group’s activities. As the group got larger, a more formal organization was needed; so in 1937, the Colt employees formed the Colt Pistol and Revolver Club and started competing with other local gun clubs. The Colt Club set up it’s range in the basement of the oil house. It was not until 1946 that the club gained permission to use the Colt range. By 1938, the Colt Club had become a charter member of the Metropolitan Revolver League. John quickly gained proficiency as a shooter. In 1938, he won sharpshooter status; in 1939 gained expert status; in 1938-1939, produced the Metropolitan Revolver League high average score. In 1941, John Hintlian won third in the state championship, and in 1942 was team champion for the Metropolitan Revolver League. John was elected president of the Colt Pistol and Revolver Club in 1942 and served in that position until 1947. He was team champion of the Club during 1946 and 1947.
John also joined the new formed Masonic Colt Cable Club in 1944 and served as it’s secretary and treasurer during 1946 and 1947. He soon rose to become a 32nd degree Mason.
The United States entered World War II in December of 1941. To protect the Colt factory from Nazi paratroopers, Colt employees organized into a Sate Guard Volunteer Reserve Corps. The guard consisted of three men’s units and the Colt Cadettes unit for women. The Guard Cadettes were trained in the use of machine guns in a school established by Colt in 1942. John Hintlian joined the Guard, quickly completed the course, and then became chief instructor of the Machine Gun School.
At the end of the war, all government contracts were immediately canceled, and the Colt plant virtually closed for a year and a half. Most of the employees returning to work after the weekend VJ Day celebration were “let go.” John continued to work for Colt until 1949. During additional post-war restructuring, John was laid off by Colt just a few months from a 20 year retirement.
In 1950, John went to work as a draftsman for the Henry and Wright Division of the Hartford-Empire Company (Emhart). He designed jibs and fixtures for the manufacture of machine dies. John later worked for another Emhart division, the Maxim Silencer Company. Maxim, best remembered today for it’s gun silencers, also made industrial silencers, what we call mufflers. When Emhart became Enbee, John worked for another division of the company, the New Britain Machine Company. John Married on 2 October, 1963. He and his wife Sirvant lived in his parent’s house until he retired in 1970, having worked two separate 20 year careers.
In addition to his full time job, John became a book dealer in the 1950s, operating a mail order business out of the house on Maple Hill Avenue in Newington. He had catalogs printed of the books that he had available to sell and advertised in national and local magazines. John corresponded with major book authors of the time and contributed material tot heir books. Books and articles by Servin, John Du Pont, Sutherland, Parsons, and Co. B.R. Lewis all contained material supplied by Hintlian. Larry Wilson and John Hintlian jointly published “Army Revolvers and Gatling Guns, a reprint of a machine gun manual from Hintlian’s collection. One third of the illustrations in Wilson’s book, “The Rampant Colt”, were supplied by John Hintlian. John also supplied rare paper items to several exhibitions. An exhibition at Trinity College sponsored by the Advertising Club of Hartford used almost 4 dozen items from Hintlian’s collection. The Wadsworth Atheneum borrowed several of John’s early paper items for it’s exhibit of “Samuel Colt Presents”, which ran from November 1961 through January 1962. The exhibition consisted of engraved guns that Sam had presented to dignitaries around the world. John jointly financed the publication of a book from the exhibition.
John Hintlian never threw anything away. In the 42 years he worked, John accumulated masses of material from the companies worked for, especially Colt. During WWII, Colt employees went through the factory looking for material to contribute to the metal drive. Splash guards from machinery, old metal identification tags, several Gatling machine guns, a Hotchkiss gun, and a Baxter steam engine were all scrapped to support the war effort. A total of 475,000 pounds of metal was contributed. In the process of cleaning the plant of surplus gun parts, various tools and leather goods were offered to John “in the interest of airing you to carry on one of your hobbies.” Therefore, contrary to popular rumor, John actually had permission to remove material from the Colt factory, and he took advantage of it. John continued to visit the Colt plant in later years and was not shy in asking for anything he saw. Of course, John remained friends with many of the Colt employees. Furthermore, as many o them moved onto other companies, he established contacts inside Remington, Winchester, and Springfield Armory. These contacts enabled John to acquire old, unusual, and experimental ammunition coveted by cartridge collectors.
Over his lifetime, John made additional contacts with members of the many gun clubs in which he belonged. John was a member of over 40 gun clubs. He was a charter or life time member of many and cofounder of one, Ye Connecticut Gun Guild. John also frequented the swap meets and flea markets in the Hartford area. There is a flea market almost every day of the week in the Hartford area. John was not one to get up early, so he generally arrived about the time most other collectors would be leaving. It did not seem to bother him, since he traded in so many different topics; he was usually able to find something of interest. John also started a tradition by having a swap meet in his back yard for the New England cartridge collectors. He would never sell the last cartridge from a box stating that he wanted to “leave it to breed” more rounds for the next show. John had an almost photographic memory when it came to matching a piece of paper or cartridge with a person he knew who bought and collected similar items. He also had a keen eye for detail and could spot the slightest variation between items with the 10-power jewelers loupe he always carried. John bought, sold, and traded material throughout his lifetime. While we tend to think of John Hintlian as a Colt and cartridge collector, his personal collection consisted of manuals and handbooks from Connecticut based machine tool companies. Everything else was for sale or trade, even though he occasionally would declare, “I’m going to hang onto that for a while.”
John tended to buy more than he sold and had to work hard to sell what he did. During most of John’s career, paper was not as collectable or treasured as it is today. Until recently, there were only a few collectors actively buying paper, and they were mostly buying material to accompany specific guns in their collections. At one time, John probably had a King’s ransom worth of early turn of the century paper, he unfortunately sold most of it before it had become valuable. In a letter from 1949, for example, we learn that John Parsons offered John $10 for an 1876 Colt Price list. As late as 1961, John’s copy of the first Hartford broadsheet issued by Sam Colt was valued at only $125. Paper that John took to shows to sell was neatly penciled in the upper right corner with the price. John never erased the original pricing. He seemed embarrassed at times to ask for more money than the marked price and would in many cases discount his current asking price. John also hated to give back change after a sale. He would usually throw in something else to round the total up rather than break a bill. In his last decade, he tended to overprice his items and did not sell as much as he could have.
With the completion of the I-91 Freeway in the 1960s, the area bordering the Berlin turnpike south of Hartford became a ghost town almost overnight. The turnpike had been a main gateway from the south and was lined with motels, gas stations, and restaurants welcoming visitors into Hartford. One of those, the Capitol City Motel, is located one block past the ramp connecting the old turnpike to the new freeway and therefore is not readily accessible to either. One must always turn around to get to it. John bought the abandoned motel in 1970. While John did have a few long term residents whose rent was paid by the State, it is not clear if he thought he could make a living operating it as a motel. It may be that he recognized it’s true potential as thirty rooms of mini storage for his stuff.
I first met John Hintlian at the 1992 CCA show in Hartford. He was the little old man in the corner with all the stuff. It was my second CCA show, and I had decided to collect Colt emblem patches. I passed by his table several times before I spotted a bag of patches, which he informed me were brought in for someone else. I staked out John’s table and waited till that person came to get the patches and then followed him back to his own table. There was a line of three or four behind me who also had spotted the patches. It turned out Rayburn wanted only the two Woodsman patches, so I bought all what remained. When I got home I had color copies made and put them into a notebook which I started carrying to the shows. That notebook was the basis of the “Colt Memorabilia Price Guide,” so in that way, John Hintlian was the genesis of my book.
After the 1992 Hartford show, I wrote to John to purchase some of his other items. We managed to write most every month. I typed my letters so he could read them, and he hand wrote his in a neat precise print. He always signed his letters to me as Johnny. It seems most people knew him as John.
In looking for additional material for my book, I made several trips to Hartford. I do not know how many of his motel rooms John had managed to fill, as I was in only three of them. As we entered a room, John carefully closed and locked the door. He did not want anyone to see us. His paranoia was warranted. In the 1980s, he had been robbed and attacked with a table leg by two men who forced their way into one of his motel rooms. That experience required hospitalization. Once inside the motel room, the first thing I noticed was the smell, it was like aged gun oil. The room was dark and lit by single 60 watt bulb. Once my eyes got accustomed to the dark, all I could see was a mountain of boxes. John stored all his material in identical cardboard boxes. He explained to me how he preferred orange boxes to tomato boxes and had the local grocery store save them for him. Boxes were stacked in double rows 6 high and 12 deep. The aisles were only 12 to 18 inches wide, forcing one to creep sideways between the towering walls of boxes. We would work our way down one aisle and then have to back out, move over, and creep down another aisle. John intentionally kept the boxes with all the same type of material scattered throughout the room with the idea that this would provide some protection from potential thieves.
I relied on John’s memory as he would direct me to the third box in the fifth stack, the bottom box in the second stack, and the top box, back side of third row, which he thought contained some material in which I would be interested. As we kept shuffling boxes, I lost track of where we were and what we had already examined. One box would be moved to make room to open another, then that one moved temporarily to another location. The same chaos also occurred within a box as Johnny would occasional find something that he had promised someone else and had previous been unable to find or he would find something that belonged in another box. These items were pulled out and carefully placed in different piles, with the expectation that he would find their proper location before they became buried again. It seemed that the more we searched the more problems we created. Papers became shuffled, like so many decks of cards. Somehow, throughout it all, John was able to keep track of everything’s location.
We took a break, and Johnny brought me lunch at his regular diner where he greeted the waitress with his trademark, “coffee now, coffee later.” I brought out my lists to see if we were overlooking anything. John hated lists because he figured they would always cost him a sale. It’s ironic, because John was the first to develop a list, the one for prewar Colt catalogs. His list is still accurate and in use after fifty years. We returned to the motel and continued searching boxes throughout the afternoon and into the evening. After 12 hours, I was exhausted and had to admit I had seen and had enough. Johnny seemed entirely willing and able to continue.
At the age of 88, John Hintlian packed up seven boxes of Colt memorabilia and paper and flew across the country to California for the Colt Collectors Association show. Upon my arrival, I called his room from the Hotel lobby, but no one answered. In a few minutes along he came. The phone in his room had too many buttons, and he would not answer it. Every time it rang, he would go down to the lobby and look for the person calling. He saw me and asked for help. He was concerned because the clerk at the reception desk had been unable to locate the boxes that he had shipped to the hotel from Hartford. I checked with he business office and they located the boxes in storage. I helped him carry them to his room. He immediately started going through them and I started buying. I was excited to have first pick of all his material, but after five hours it was midnight and I realized that I had just given him all the money I had intended for the entire show. John managed to get five boxes of material stacked on, under, and around his single trade table. He had so much one could hardly find individual items. As I had already been through his material, I searched the other tables. Throughout Thursday and Friday, he had a number of customers.
The rare items were bought, but the majority of material was passed over as just too expensive. By Saturday, no one was buying from him, and he was getting discouraged. John was also worried about having so much left to pack and ship back to Hartford. The hotel required a credit card to ship packaged and Johnny had never owned a credit card. Therefore, John accepted an offer from the man at the next table to buy everything for “one money”. Word that Hintlian had sold out spread quickly, and people streamed back to his table to see what they’d missed. Rumors about what the new owner was going to do were quickly answered as he marked everything down 50%. He intended to sell everything. A flood of people mobbed the table. When the commotion slowed down, the discount increased to 75%, and then to 90%. Prices were now so cheap on what was left that not even John Hintlian could resist and he started buying back some of his own material! That was the last time I saw John Hintlian.
John Ogle